Office politics cost your business billions

The age of big data has seen businesses making a concerted effort to destroy data silos, allowing information to be accessed and used by anyone in the organisation. The logic behind these efforts is clear – data locked into legacy systems is costing business $140bn every year.

Legacy systems have always been a tricky subject, particularly as so many line-of-business operations are reliant on older applications. Throw office politics into the mix, and there is no easy solution. Which is why many organizations simply absorb the cost, assuming that resolving the issue will be even more expensive.

Repeating the mistakes of the past

Clearly $140bn is a massive number – but it may actually be an underestimate. As businesses move to the cloud, many of the same mistakes are being repeated using hosted systems.

Increasingly common is the adoption of cloud services without first consulting the CTO. Sales may purchase a hosted CRM subscription for instance, creating a new, disconnected repository of customer data. The service department may opt for another completely different application, which has its own data store.

As much as businesses try to repair the damage done by legacy applications, they are now making exactly the same mistakes with the cloud.

Becoming more joined up

Despite the rapid pace of innovation, businesses need to take time to develop a coherent strategy that unifies data stores for sharing across the organization. This location of the data – on-site, cloud, or hybrid – is of lesser importance than the ability of all stakeholders to access it. Continuing to purchase systems and services that cannot support this centralization will prove to be a false economy however.

It may be that we see a return to on-site data centers, but modified to provide storage as a fluid layer (similar to that used by cloud services). Applications can then connect to this common data layer, ensuring that information can be shared between programs and departments.

To learn more about redeploying your existing data arrays to build a data layer and destroy departmental silos, please give us a call.